Enrique Vargas was born in Colombia in 1940. In 1955 he started studying dramaturgy, acting and directing at the National Dramaturgy School of Bogota. For six years, starting in 1960. He studied drama anthropology in Michigan, at the Kalamazoo College. He then became a playwright and director for one of the most important experimental theatres in the world, La Mama in New York, where he crafted impressive and thought-provoking works that express his peculiar research in the development of a body language.
Later on he became a playwright and head of the Gut Theatre in East Harlem. The works he made in those days show a peculiar, unique re-use of the popular festivals the Puerto Ricans celebrate in the streets of New York. These shows are a tool to develop a dramatic game whose key feature, in addition to body expression, is the search for a “playing space”. His aim was to turn attendees into participants, protagonists of their own festival, actors staging a collective ritual.
In the early ‘70s he focused on dramaturgy of object animation at the Central Theatre in Prague and in the early ‘80s he became director of the Theatre Research Centre of the National University of Colombia. In that same period he focused especially on the relationship between the game, the ritual and the childhood myths of the Indio communities living in the Amazon Region of Colombia. At the end of the ‘80s he directed several works, and after founding, in 1993, the Teatro de los Sentidos (Theatre of the Senses) he wrote, staged and directed a trilogy of works called Under the sign of the Labyrinth
During his renowned career he was awarded several prizes like the Quebec Expo Theatre Festival 1967 prize, the Colombia National Dramaturgy Prize (1988); the First Prize at the National Salon of Plastic Arts (1992); the Tucan de Oro prize at the Cadiz Theatre Festival (1993); the UNESCO Theatre Research Prize (1995). He collaborates with El Espectador, the oldest and most renowned Colombian information magazine.